In tonight's problematic panels, I want someone to tell us what the hell the title of that lesson plan actually means when translated into a language that doesn't instantly cause cancer.
Meanwhile, Dotty thinks that being stuck in a student-run disaster of a class session is a good use of her time.
Okay so I looked it up, and basically the lesson plan is about how you see those white girls with the "I'm sorry black america" signs and shit, basically making a big show of how fucking not racist they are.
So Leslie is mocking Roz.
>Leslie ditching her own class to convert Robin to lesbianism
I can't believe this is an actual thing.
>two of six panels dedicated to scratching once at the surface of the new Dorothy storyline
That's the best you could do?
>Roz's suspenders don't reach her pants
Why is this a thing, Willis? It's as easy as drawing just a little bit extra on the line-art.
Ok, that can't be a coincidence that was the plan for today before she shoved Roz into "teaching" the class. Like did she somehow predict she would find another gay chick in her class to use in her plan to make DeSanto fuck off?
in the weird timescape this comic takes place in, is it too late for the students to get refunded the full amount now that their teacher just pieced out and made a non-TA student give the lesson?
>Roz's suspenders don't reach her pants
Now that has to be a mistake. Cause otherwise those straps are useless/just hanging there.
Honestly, given how much Roz was shitting on Joyce a couple weeks ago (comic time) it wouldn't surprise me if Leslie'd had this planned for a while.
Well Dorthy is making the right choice here by not involving herself in everyones fucking problems. Probably why she get a C in the first place, even though it means fucking nothing in the long run if she doesn't get more/any worse.
>I want someone to tell us what the hell the title of that lesson plan actually means when translated into a language that doesn't instantly cause cancer.
"Mouthy straight white people talking over minorities is bad"
It means Willis is sticking it to the man. But he is the man, so he's sticking it to himself. And Roz.
giggity
Nah, that's just how Willis draws suspenders.
And now I really just want to see Roz's shorts drop without anything holding them up.
It's something Sup Forums claims all the fucking time, that SJWs do their thing for brownie points and regularly talk over the people they claim to support.
Honestly though if you can read above a 4th grade level you should get that. No made up words there.
Now I wonder what Willis googled to find a lesson such as..... whatever the fuck that is.
No, Willis just doesn't draw buckles for some reason.
I know that's the way he's always done it, but Roz's undershirt is poking out from beneath her sweater, so both it and the sweater are overlapping the top of her shorts.
Even if you don't want to draw buckles as a "style" choice, you must know they'd theoretically attach to a belt line, which is impossible with the suspenders falling over two layers of clothes that are blocking Roz's belt line.
So I guess next strip is gonna be a scene change with Leslie, Becky, and Joyce walking to Leslie's place. Becky then says some wacky Lesbian joke while Joyce says something along the lines of punching DeSanto for "hating gays" while Leslie ponders what damage Roz could be doing "teaching" the class.
Plenty of made up concepts though
Also, I'm pretty sure "de-amplify" isn't a thing
Just pretend it's supposed to be a skinny scarf and quit letting it bug you.
Dorothy, if your time is so thin right now maybe you should leave this farce of a class for this day and go gain some of it back by doing something that isn't a waste of time.
Or
He could say 'fuck that' to realism
And go complain about Transformers for a while
Are you genuinely retarded?
or he could just not draw suspenders at all
For some reason Willis didn't want to use the correct terms. "Performative allyship" should be "virtue signalling" and "de-amplifying" should be "co-opting."
>allyship - The role or status of being an ally.
What a terrible word.
I hope Leslie doesn't expect freshmen to understand that shit, but she has proven herself to be a terrible teacher time and again.
"Virtue signalling" is typically used by right-leaning people, and "performative allyship" is definitely a leftist term. Willis was correct here.
Ah feck off Sup Forums you lot call everything virtue signalling.
Do you think "de-amplify" is a word?
A lot of things are. Its how you show others that you are 'right' and with them, so to get a benefit.
It's a word-construct that emphasizes the salient point at hand. 'De-amplifying' emphasizes that something that should be strong isn't.
Specific language is typical fare for any topic in liberal arts and the softer sciences. The language you use in a discussion shapes how the topic is perceived and understood. If Leslie used, for instance, 'virtue signalling' instead of 'performative allyship', then the conversation would inevitably be colored by the use of typical Sup Forums rhetoric.
It's a perfectly valid construction, if that's what you're asking.
>And now I really just want to see Roz's shorts drop
That's what those "Welcome to the Fuck Zone" pinups are for.
Isn't she *working* for the paper? Wouldn't it be her actual job to get a story like that?
Okay, female here. I have a Master's degree in English and took 2 feminism-based literature classes in grad school (to be fair, I didn't know one of them would be focused on women). I also spend enough time on Tumblr to get a full picture of what we have here.
Ally = someone who stands up for minorities
Marginalization = ignoring minorities in mainstream stuff and treating them like crap
Thus: marginalized voices = minorities who try to speak up but are shut down by straight, white men
Performative allyship = claiming to be an ally for the sake of being an ally and saying that you are so awesome for helping the cause
De-amplifying = muting, smothering, etc.
De-amplifying voices = speaking over someone
Let's put all of this together.
Performative allies are people who pretend to be good friends of minorities but don't actually give a crap about them.
Performative allies who de-amplify marginalized voices are people who yell "BLACK LIVES MATTER" when actual black people are talking.
Roz is screwed, because she talked over Leslie about gay rights, and this seems distinctly pointed toward shutting her down for good.
>Ok, that can't be a coincidence that was the plan for today before she shoved Roz into "teaching" the class. Like did she somehow predict she would find another gay chick in her class to use in her plan to make DeSanto fuck off?
Lesbians have magic powers.
Let me de-ascend from my grammar high horse and try to un-inform myself of my mis-correctness then.
When Raging Against the Machine, it's usually good form to make sure you're not part of the Machine you're raging against. A lot of internet nice guys like Willis forget this factor.
"De-ascend" is improper use of prefixes, uninform is a real word, and miscorrectness is also a real word but you're using it incorrectly. Deamplify is also a real word.
>degrade
>dehumidify
>decomposition
>deoxygenation
>unbend
>unfasten
>uncork
>unloose
>uncover
>misfortune
>misunderstanding
>mistrust
>"De-ascend" is improper use of prefixes, uninform is a real word, and miscorrectness is also a real word but you're using it incorrectly. Deamplify is also a real word.
Also this.
It will never stop being hilarious that Zack de la Rocha is a millionaire.
The biggest problem is with language "what works" isn't always by the books, and with enough people being wrong about the proper form the most accepted form is the "wrong" one since it's what the most people recognize. De-amplify makes perfect sense to me even though it really doesn't look like the proper word.
It definitely doesn't look right, but it's a good shorthand for what Leslie wanted to say. I think it would take multiple additional words to get the same meaning.
There are plenty of verbs that start with "de-," so I don't see the harm in "de-amplify" at all.
Well like the example with de-ascend, we have a word for that, descend. Demplify just doesn't roll off the tongue very well. Damplify is weird too. Dampening is what she's referring to, like sound dampening, but the term doesn't sit the same with what her intent is like de-amplify does.
>Deamplify is also a real word.
Why can't I find it in any dictionaries or find it used anywhere at all?
The harm in using de-amplify is that it's not a word, and 'amplify' has plenty of real antonyms that are actually words:
>decrease
>diminish
>compress
>weaken
It needs to be a word that relates to sound, or it doesn't work as well when referring to voices.
My four examples could very easily be applied to sound, and 'diminish' and 'weaken' can certainly be applied to 'voices'.
Amplify itself has numerous synonyms that apply equally well in any given situation.
It sure does, that's why you don't say stuff like "un-weaken the bass track".
Strictly speaking one would deamplify something that has already been amplified.
I think "stifle" would be the best choice here.
You can tell it's a scam if the class has the word "Studies" in the title. Like how any country with "People's" in its name is a dictatorship.
I'm assuming English isn't your first language, because English laughs at the concept of "not a word"
And De-amplify is perfectly cogent. It clearly has a sense of taking a message that is or should be being made louder and muting it. Actively working against an amplification.
I can't wait to tell those uppity STEM majors that a giant chunk of their curriculum is a scam.
Regardless of the title of the lesson plan, who else is ready to see Roz either fail or see the error of her ways?
we're not gonna actually see her teach, the only main characters left with her dont give a shit about the lesson. we're just gonna follow leslie
Ah, yes, we'll hear about it from Walky as he tells Dorothy about it later.
Anyone remember why Walky doesn't like Roz? Or is it just that he didn't like the idea of class being held in general?
Walky doesn't like going to class in general, plus the only reason he took the class was because he thought it an easy A. As for why he doesn't like Roz, no one likes Roz. She has no friends. Joe has had sex with her on multiple occasions but otherwise doesn't interact with her. Mary is the closest thing she has to an emotional connection to her peers. The only people who seem to care about her are Riley and, God knows why, Robin.
I wonder if we're going to immediately skip to the next group or if we'll get a strip or two of the class.
I think he will move somewhere else. The class is pointless now unless he does some Walky/Dorothy stuff.
Performative Allyship and the De-amplifying of Marginalized Voices was Willis original name for Dumbing of Age, but he decided to go for less of a self-own.
I still can't believe this is happening. It's pretty shitty to say you could teach a class better than your instructor, but Leslie should be less petty than that. Also this could hurt the other students in the room even more than Roz's self-esteem. All in all a real shitty maneuver, even if you want Roz to get some comeuppance for thinking she knows everything.
That's actually some decent composition in zooming out from Roz, emphasizing how alone and awkward she is in a large space, rather than doing the standard closeup framing with uncomfortable expressions.
No one learns in Dumbing of Age. Ever.
She probably planned to bring Roz up and say "Roz, you think my class is so easy so why don't you take over"
All Virtue Signalling isn't Performative Allyship
But all Performative Allyship is Virtue Signalling.
But Leslie didn't know that Joyce's "Friend" would be in the class that day.
Why would that have been necessary or relevant to bringing Roz up to try to teach a lesson.
She would've just brought Roz up to the front of the class and had her fumble over herself. Leslie does not have to leave in order to do that.
Your interpretation of Leslie is a rather brutal person.
Every one in Willis' comic is petty and vindictive because he seems to find those to be admiral traits.
The punchline of this strip is hilarious given that Willis has made a career out of co-opting marginilized struggle in his comics.
I'm not sure. I think she planned the lesson to deal with Roz but not necessarily make her teach it.
That's actually kind of sad.
So much for a college setting then, huh?
[Insert cynical jibe about modern education]
>social studies
I know Leslie's plan is to make DeSanto care about the gays by using Becky, but it's gonna backfire because using Becky will just make DeSanto start to really hate the Gays or even more then she currently does.
You'd have a point if it wasn't for the fact that Robin has...basically the exact same personality. I always saw Robin as Willis showing he could do a character right. Like Robin was super upbeat, zany and wacky but also no one really seemed to like her that much. Which kinda offset your dislike of her.
Becky's basically Poochie.Everyone likes her and is interested in what she has to say or is doing. And whenever she's not on screen everyone has to ask "where's Becky?"
Amber was better when she had long hair.
>Robin sees Becky as a campaign point
>Becky starts working on the campaign
>Becky has to work with Dick Nose and never puts together he attacked Joyce
>Joyce comes to visit
>Dick Nose confronts her
>Becky saves the day
can't wait for this in 2018.
It's Roz so it's okay. In the real world Roz could have easily gotten kicked out of class for being that aggressive with Joyce. Considering she was already on thin ice for filming a sextape in her dorm for the purpose of starting a sex scandal, she could have gotten expelled for yelling at Joyce.
Robin is going to go full Leslie towards Becky, which in turn will lead to Dina trying to seduce Leslie to make Robin jealous.
>In the real world Roz could have easily gotten kicked out of class for being that aggressive with Joyce.
Leslie did make her leave. And if you're talking about permanency, she would have to go through the front office, because it's very difficult to remove students after the first two weeks have passed.
>Robin is going to go full Leslie towards Becky, which in turn will lead to Dina trying to seduce Leslie to make Robin jealous.
These shenanigans would border on interesting.
Yes, I meant permanently. That level of aggression towards another student is something the front office would take very seriously.
Seeing the romantic shenanigans unfold, Joyce takes it upon herself to see true love happen and decides to take one for the team and seduce Robin. However, since she's a sheltered fundie, she has no idea where to begin and turns to the only person she knows with extensive experience seducing women to turn her into a vampy lesbian, Joe.
>These shenanigans would border on interesting.
Don't worry, nothing interesting will happen.
It'll be hard to top Toedad's Wild Ride.
Hey, where are all those "lesson plans" she was copying out, anyway? I'm assuming it's not the resources she gave to Becky, considering she probably would've just gotten those done when she found out about her on the off chance she ever showed up. Also, resources aren't "lesson plans."
I'm pretty sure the issue is that Willis has no idea what a lesson plan really is.
The fact that she needed to print a billion of them means it was probably in-class worksheets for the next few weeks. Not terribly plausible, but as a former temporary professor, that's all I can think of.
Yeah, worksheets or handouts would make more sense.
Now I want Becky to partake in Cadbury cereal and end up a Congresswoman competing against Robin.
Is her plan to make DeSanto fuck off or fuck her?
Maybe a bit of the latter and then the former.
She wants her to realize the plight of the lgbt person in America, come out as queer publicly, and then try to make policy that supports lgbt people in America. And then give her the wild cunnilingus when she gets re-elected.
Robin, on the other hand, simply wants to stay in power and will do anything to keep that going. She's mentioned letting guys talk down to her to avoid rocking the boat. She wears glasses to appear to be smarter than she is, and she really doesn't want to admit that she's not straight.
So, I guess she'll bring Becky as an example, and either Robin will come to the right side and Leslie will be happy to have her around, or she'll refuse to change her mind and Leslie will have to kick her out. I'm not sure entirely how it'll work, seeing as Becky is getting lots of support from people who want to support her, and had no problem getting a job, so she's not really an example of someone suffering from her policy, she's suffering from a bigoted father, but society has her back. It would make more sense if Becky had been explicitly turned away by faith based shelters, so she'd have trauma that relates to Robin's stances.
...when did this Robin is anti-gay thing come from? It's 2017. Trump isn't even anti gay. So why does willis think this is a thing. Gay marriage wasn't over turned. I'm very confused. Is Willis just a like other on the left who are reacting to hypotheticals.
>Trump isn't even anti gay.
He's claimed a few times that he's going to get equal marriage repealed.
Has he? I know he's said he's for tradional marriage but I never heard him talk about overturning gay marriage.
The VP's is about as fundamentalist Protestant as humanly possible, and he supports using federal funds for conversion therapy, a practice which has generally proven to be ineffective and generally causes more stress to LGBT youth. And the rest of the cabinet isn't exactly friendly to the LGBT community either. So, Trump saying he'll play nice with the gays is like someone assuring you that they take care of their health after ordering their weight in glazed donuts and bacon.
But back on topic, Robin herself isn't anti-gay. She just does whatever will get her yelled at the least by her party, which means passing anti-gay laws. It's sort of a 'crime by association' thing.
>The only people who seem to care about her are Riley and, God knows why, Robin.
I'm not sure if Robin actually cares about Roz beyond hoping that she doesn't start any more scandals.
Because politicians have been openly anti gay for decades prior to not and the only reason they're shifting their opinions is because it is now more popular to support gay rights than to oppose them.
What's wrong with that
...
I was just saying it sounded like he was anti-gay in response to a comment that said he wasn't. Don't read too much into it. But it really shouldn't be up to the president who can marry who. It's dumb. It's like mandating that everyone has to be a vegetarian. In America, people should have the right to do what they want in their own homes, as long as they aren't hurting someone (whether physically, emotionally, financially, etc.).
I wonder if this strip is what really spiraled Willis down the path of utter spitefulness because someone laughed at it once.
So much better. Even with her Tragic Backstory.
Then he hair and core persona changed.
As someone who finds Malaya cute, and am always a fan of asses I am fond of this comic.